Accidentally On Purpose

owls are cool.

Contests are the tool of the devil. Generating manufactured interest in a product or service by providing an incentive for the interaction just seems like a bait and switch. So of course, we did one. By did one I mean I needed a platform to try out a piece of software for my real job, so I figured the least dangerous place would be on the measly Table Flip Fan Page where no one would notice. I then proceeded to make it OBVIOUSLY fake by using sassy lingo, not updating the terms and conditions, and providing an ambiguous prize namely a “bottle of wine”. Well the fates have a funny way of spinning thread, people actually entered. Not just people, but strangers. This put us in a funny position, what was once just a test to see if a piece of software worked now has an obligation to see it through. In essence, I now have to buy a drink for a stranger. I’m not so good at that. I have a long track record of bar housed failures and awkward “what are you doing?” moments. This is bound to go just as well. So enter if you choose, I promise to send you a bottle of wine if you win and the laws of your governing region allow it. In for a penny, in for a pound I guess.

On a side note, we’re trying our first wine from Uruguay tonight: Las Brujas (translates to “The Witches” but don’t confuse the Roald Dahl novel for youths). It has an owl on it, I like it already. It has… large tannins. Chalk on the nose and black licorice smacks you as though you were an insubordinate child in the 40s. It also smells like Bic pens and tastes like “some kind of berry”, we’re very specific and talented tasters obviously.

Oh right the contest, click here I guess.

http://on.fb.me/14GFqWK

Harts of Darkness

It appears our ruse de guerre in the form of a ramshackle fence is holding the deer at bay. Scattered footprints have littered the ground up to the fence lines, but while most of the prints seem just curious proddings, no attack has been mounted… yet. We must prepare our defenses though; the coming season will present a field of “soft targets” for the deer, as our vines shall burst through the ground with vigor previously unknown. A new season should produce a much better result with our growing but still meager competence. Hopes have run high while we drown in our competitor’s far superior potables. Grandiose plans have been laid out to make this season a success, some involved celebrity sponsorship, dignified sign holding, or reciting now defunct beat poetry. None however can even hold a candle for what we have in store for our “deer friends”.

Enough with deadwood parapets, I’ve had it up to here *gestures madly* with twine. Two words shall strike fear into the hearts of our enemies, Split. Rail. Hammer, nails, shovels, and picks shall turn our peaceful ground into a no man’s land. They will speak only in hush whispers (deers can whisper, right?) of the towering wood ramparts. Two and a half feet down we will dig every post and eight inch vicious looking spikes shall bind it together. My Pater Familius has offered his services on the project to, and I quote, “make sure it ends up being a square”. Obviously a knock on the previous levels of quality we’ve been able to achieve.  Here’s hoping we create something that “doesn’t make [him] gouge his eyes out”. Will split rail be enough? Doubtful, so we must also utilize two of my favorite words (when spoken individually): chicken wire. The bane of every paper mache artist’s existence and hopefully a hatred also shared by smaller more feisty pests like rabbits, gophers, or tiny solicitors. We will fasten it to cover everything below the bottom rungs of the fence sealing it off. There will be no tiny solicitors, not on my watch.

This endeavor may end up being the most expensive undertaking of the project so far, but spite is the most powerful motivator… and I love spite.

Example!!

“What do you mean it’s not called a ‘missile toe’?”

It’s the holiday season at Table Flip, a time of reflection, idiocy, and wine we didn’t make. We’ve had a good year, all things considered. For the cost of only a couple thousand dollars, we’ve managed to create something of little substance with an enormous investment of time. While scouring the Internet, we found an old Latin proverb that we’ve adopted for ourselves and it seems most fitting: “parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus” which roughly translates to “mountains will be in labour, and an ridiculous mouse will be born”. In essence, it means we’ve put in a lot of work and the result will be ridiculous. That being said, I think its time we thanked those who have helped us so far for all they have done to make something so silly so possible. Without these people, this would have remained another dead idea in the elephant graveyard of empty promises that is the result of most nights of heavy drinking.

To my Father and Step-Mother: Thanks for letting us tear up your property with a vigor normally reserved for the fifteen seconds of excitement you get when you first hear the ice cream truck before realizing you don’t want ice cream. Sorry we keep breaking tools, I swear its not on purpose although I realize that seems hard to believe.

To my Mother, Betty Anne, and Grandmother: Thanks for your support, but you know this is a bad idea right?

To Chris: Thank you for keeping an even keel while I vomited ideas at you like when you open an old closet forgetting you’ve rammed it full of refuse.

To Wylie: Thanks for getting ants up your pants, no really. I will cherish the memory forever.

To Jen: Thanks for being just insane enough to talk to the plants, you’re a nut bar you know that right?

To Jane:  Thanks for bringing that big red rock-pounding tool, there’s just no good way to say that.

To Alex: Thanks for letting us ruin your car by filling the trunk with topsoil. I’d like to say it’s not the silliest thing we did to that car, but I’d be lying.

To Marnie, Ben, Terri-Lynn, Derek, Sian (day-labourers): Thanks for taking a day out of your lives so we can relive the indentured servitude of yesteryear.

To the deer: Despite your vial, despicable, and devilish nature, you ignored the vineyard entirely since we’ve erected that awful fence (see picture below). You even ignored the gaping 12 ft entrance we allowed to exist. I swear next year we will build a real fence, one that you can be proud to say “[expletive deleted] that noise! I am not going trying to cross that thing!” For you, I tribute a lovely video by Louis CK, you’re welcome.

To the ants: Thanks for quietly evicting yourself. I didn’t have a printer to print out the notice myself.

See you in 2013 people of the Internet, I swear we’ll have more positive things to write about, but then again where’s humor without failure?

There and Back Again

It never hurts to go back to the beginning, to your inspiration, to where your ideas were strictly embryonic and that voice in the back of your head is still winning the fight of “don’t do it!” Six months ago, we were in Niagara On The Lake testing the libations of various wineries until we could barely feel shame. We had fallen in love with wine, an ancient siren song luring us towards the rocks. With each stop on our tour we felt ourselves drift further from reality, the bills at home, the hungry and angry cat (that insists that my entire apartment is its toilet), and the balance of our diminishing bank accounts. It was on this ground that we had decided that a vineyard was a swell idea. We figured we couldn’t be the worst at it so what could possibly hold us back? Well here we were again on yet another tour of duty of Niagara On The Lake’s wineries, hoping to catch that spirit that inspired us so long ago.

Instead we got mighty drunk.

With three sheets to the wind and the soul of Atalanta in our feet, we thought it would be a great idea to make it a race against ourselves to ensure that we hit every winery that had any signs of life. The festival again had a food pairing to go with a wine sample at each facility, some were paired beautifully so that the flavor of the wine altered, others felt as discombobulating as a Tom Bombadil segue. Ravine for example, had ribs from pigs raised on their own property. To quote the woman describing them “you can really taste the love we put in the pigs”, you know, before they were put to death for our tasting. They had paired it with… something, a wine probably, but we were too distracted by the ribs to notice. Others got a little more creative; Inniskillin paired a Vidal ice wine with sweet chili Thai chicken wings, it was a surprisingly opulent but nifty combination. The nicest surprise of the day was the discovery of a room entirely devoted to back vintage Baco Noir down at Henry of Pelham. We got away relatively easy buying only the 1999, 2003 (which had turned, womp womp), and the 2005.When the dust eventually settled and the wine purchases were tallied, we probably spent more on the weekend buying wine than trying to produce our own. This isn’t to say that making your own is frugal, but rather a testament to our lack of impulse control.

Oh yeah, and we bought chickens. An entire brood of chickens.

This is right after we all spent 30 seconds petting Jennifer’s face for no reason.

“I’m sorry, you’ve been outsourced”

Plenty of themes have run rampant for us this season: broken tools on the scale of Sodom and Gomorrah (I had to look up the spelling), two of the seven plagues of Egypt (one was deer right?), and an ever increasing feeling of David and Goliath (OK! OK! I know nothing of theology, geeze!). Above all though, torpidity has reigned supreme. What started as a land rush of excitement and laughter has diluted slowly into the drudgery that apparently is real gardening. It’s obvious that none of us are botanists or horticulturalists. In fact, the closest thing we have to a green thumb is fumbling with dyed beer on St. Patrick’s Day. It hasn’t crushed our spirits, but it certainly has stymied our fervor. As winter approached, we found that none of us had the will to “finish the job” so to speak and bury the vines. As we stared at one another across the table made geometric by a series of red rings from sloppy drinking and a lack of coasters, we made a solemn decision: to outsource the hell out of our problems.

Cue the deus ex machina…

We paid a local gardener to solve our woes and bury the vines for the winter. The cost was a pittance and the peace of mind was beyond value. The biggest challenge though, is how to tell people that we effectively “outsourced” the work on a backyard vineyard without sounding like stuck up dolts. The answer is its impossible, even when you consider it cost us less to have them do it than to do it ourselves. I fear we’ve crossed a line from humble to pretentious all for the sake of not wanting to do a little hard labor. This is a far cry from the weekend before when we invaded the vineyard like Visigoths. I’m told there’s still a field scarred by the wood chips of our thousand futile axe swings. So I guess we’ll just have to accept coming off as yuppies even as I write this from a 400 sq. ft. apartment. Drat.

 

Jane said they look like little graves… gulp

You’re Invited to a Bris!

We descended on the vineyard early and hung over on a Saturday morning, and by descended I mean we had to take three runs on the snowy driveway in an Acura equipped with the eternal lie that is “all-season” tires. Our goal was to build the fence of “too little, too late” to prevent deer from finishing off our already ravaged vineyard. We decided to build this fence not with real building materials, but with deadwood and broken dreams… and twine. Its design was to be simple and elegant, a palisade of Norse quality where from its ramparts we could watch the deer in their Sisyphean struggle to break our stalwart defenses. That didn’t work out. What ended up happening is we took the most basic, medieval, and brutal instruments we could find to hack and slash our way to something that would stand so long as the breeze didn’t take it just right. We burst from the barn armed with axes and mallets to run across the snow covered ground and slaughter the brush with our raw manliness. On the first swing of unadulterated testosterone, the axe handle shattered into a thousand pieces of “Oh come on! SERIOUSLY?!?” and it only got more productive as the day went. Splinters flew, expletives spewed, and the wood erected (teehee) with only a few inches planted into the ground to keep the posts from swaying. We were proud, although the end result could only be classified as a fascination to deer rather than a real deterrent.

The line must be drawn here! Here! No further!

I had real trouble with the title of this blog, I half considered Alice in Wonderland’s “off with their heads!” or even a more mundane “a little off the top”. You see, we discovered that vineyards have an undo button. If the vines haven’t grown enough during the first season either due to climate conditions, incompetence, or general waywardness, you can just snip away your mistakes. A quick googling told us that the vines should have reached at least 30” in the first year, some did, some would have, others preferred to slack off in the back and jeer. Anything that didn’t make it to 30” had to be cut down nearly to the base so that each would have only three bulbs on it. The idea being that the plant will have another shot  next year with a better established root system. With a single tear and a slow swallowing of pride, we cut each vine down. We half considered making a laurel crown out of the remains but that’s usually for victory, and this was hardly victory.

Undo! Undo!!!!

Winter is coming, look busy

Well hot dang…

Canadian Thanksgiving is a most wondrous time of gluttony and forced appreciation. However, if you carve your way through the decimated fowl population and congealed fat colonizing our arteries you’ll find a tiny brigade of revelers experiencing sympathy pains for an ailing vineyard. A brief cold snap has stunted any growth likely for the rest of the season and dealt a possible death knell to one vine named Juan. Juan had a dream of going to Devry to get his mechanics certificate and working part time at Apple Auto Glass. He would be the first of his family to accomplish this. Not so impressive when you consider the rest of his family are grape vines on their way to producing Bacchus’ sweet nectar, but a child has to make its own way. Unfortunately it would not be so for poor Juan though, Boreas must have his sacrifice. If we had a flag, we’d prepare for it to fly at half-mast but a flagpole is fairly down on our list of purchases, right between a Jetski and a Polish translated Gettysburg Address.

But Juan’s sacrifice may be for the good of us all as it put a fire under us to get everything ready for winter. The old instructional tale of the ant and the grasshopper rings a bell here for we have prepared NOTHING for the coming cold. I mean zip, zilch, and nada. The ambivalent and omnipresent Google tells us that we’ll need to bury the vines past the graph (some kind of knuckley looking thing on the stem) in soil. We should have to add about 6-8 inches of soil per vine, and some basic arithmetic tells us we’ll need about 5 or 6 yards of soil. Arithmetic though, has never, even once, been my strong suit. It could end up being a mountainous amount of soil that we could climb to re-enact that famous planting of the flag at Iwo Jima but again, we’d need a flagpole (maybe kickstarter?). We also read that putting in a layer of straw with the soil will help insulate the little vines during the winter months much like when you had to struggle with “long johns” as a child all the while wondering who John was and why you were in possession of his undergarments. Much to our embarrassment though, like true city slickers we have no clue where to buy straw.

The end of our first season draws near and although it would be nice to sit back and reflect, instead we’ll have to bury our mistakes and wait for spring.

Do Not Accept Cheques From This Deer

 

Vagabonds, vandals, and furry demons from the ninth circle of hell… that’s the circle for treachery right? While last week I wrote lightly on the deer casually om nom nom-ing on our vineyard, this week my keyboard is filled with spite (and dust I should probably clean). They came from some pan-dimensional vortex on the cleft hooves of evil while we were left unawares in scattered Toronto abodes. Ever seen that scene from Gone with the Wind where everyone lies around suffering? Imagine that but with vines and grow tubes. Or conversely, try watching Sex In The City 2: Lost in New York. The deer could not get past the grow tubes that held the main stalk of the vines but they could certainly harangue the vines by taking anything that peeked above the plastic trenches. We were humbled again by nature showing how categorically callous it can be towards our ambition to be self-sustainable in our inebriation.

So we suffered from a bit of viticultural hubris and left them unguarded, what of it? I guess we imagined ourselves as the Switzerland of vineyards. You know, kinda quirky, kinda fun, and kinda holding all of our money. Instead we ended up being some sort of Amsterdam red light district for deer hedonism. Wylie (our resident kook) thought we should counter the deer by inviting wolves over for tea, but that seemed like it would end badly. Alex (chief of security) wanted to set up a live web cam for the vineyard to catch the deer in action but that seemed voyeuristic. Neither seem feasible partly because I lack solar panels to power a web cam and partly because I don’t know what kind of tea to serve wolves. The vines however seemed to survive the violence though and may yet still live.

We did get our first sniff of frost this week though; it appears we’ll have to expedite our winterizing. For the record, we have no idea what we’re doing in this regard. Bonne chance.

It All Comes Out in the Wash

A foul wind blew over the vineyard, it was quiet… too quiet. We trundled up the slope of the vineyard ready to face the Khan to our Kirk. Red ants have plagued the vineyard since our intrepid Wylie had some of them get frisky with him when we were weeding. The Internet told us we should fight them with everything in the grocery store but to no avail. This past weekend though, they were missing. No sign, no eggs, and no gloating came from their little hill. They simply vanished leaving a ghost town behind, but we still couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched. Either they have given up on our war of attrition, or they are planning to lure us into itchy bitey trap.

I wish there were a dignified way to build a shoestring vineyard but alas it isn’t so. We’ve managed to trip, spill, and crawl our way through our first growing season but there is just no shortage of dissenting beasts looking to knock us down a peg. With the ants’ departure, deer felt the need to fill the void. Like the Headless Horseman, they swept down from the conveniently placed salt lick (a mere 20 feet from the vineyard we’ve discovered because you know… that makes sense to have) to decapitate the vines one at a time leaving the rest to quiver in fear. Like all things we’ve encountered, there’s a ludicrous way to deal with it: Irish Spring Soap. I wish it wasn’t so but according to numerous blogs and sites we’ve encountered, if you festoon the area with enough bars of soap the deer will be insulted and keep their distance. There are other more expensive ways to deal with them like deer netting, temporary fencing, and chicken wire but nothing seems so delightfully asinine as hanging soap from a vineyard. If nothing else, our wine will smell like a pubescent boy trying to impress you with his hygiene. That can’t be bad right?

Go baby go!

L’eau and Behold

The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner is one of my least favorite poems; in fact it’s down right frustrating because now it has a quite literal meaning. The property has water coming out of every nook and cranny, but none of these crannies are near the vineyard. The vines are still growing in their own way, many are already peeking out of their grow tubes like two kids in a trench coat. I’d call this progress and an affirmation that the grow tubes do in fact work. Others would say, “of course they’re growing, it’s still summer you dolt”. We were a bit concerned that they wouldn’t if I’m being honest, but blind faith in Google has paid off yet again. Some of the vines have already burst out of the tubes though and that brings us back to square one for pest control but I’ll be damned if we’re building a fence in September.

The problem is that watering the vines is starting to feel like being stuck in line at Tim Hortons with someone who insists on paying with exact change. The nearest source of water is a hose that we can hook up to a spring but the pressure is about as exhilarating as watching The Postman on mute. For a mere $10,000 we could dig a new well but we’re poor, like MC Hammer poor. The best thing we can come up with is to hook up a pump to a nearby pond and feed the water uphill. But why stop there when we can be lazier! We could also feed the pump into a sleek, sinuous, and preferably cheap irrigation system. It would cost us around $250.00 between the pump and the system and all we would have to do in future trips would be to flick a switch to water the vines. So the question becomes, is $250.00 worth not having to wait passively beside a watering can being filled? Sure, why not.

Progress is being made, however we are a long way from finishing the vineyard. We still eventually have to build a fence, winterize, and exchange cursory glances with the menacing deer.

The ants still live by the way.

Look at the little arms!